The implementations are meant to coexist side-by-side and each has its own advantages in terms of available features, integrations, supported platforms, maturity level and performance. They share the same API for invoking and handling RPCs, thus limiting the lock-in and enabling users to choose the implementation that satisfies their needs the best (and perhaps adjust their choice over time without needing to do too much refactoring).

The following documentation is for the original gRPC C# implementation only (the Grpc.Core nuget package).

NUGET DEVELOPMENT FEED (NIGHTLY BUILDS)

In production, you should use officially released stable packages available on http://nuget.org, but if you want to test the newest upstream bug fixes and features early, you can use the development nuget feed where new nuget builds are uploaded nightly.

Use Visual Studio 2017 (on Windows) to open the solution Grpc.sln or use Visual Studio Code with C# extension (on Linux and Mac). gRPC C# code has been migrated to dotnet SDK .csproj projects that are much simpler to maintain, but are not yet supported by Xamarin Studio or Monodevelop (the NuGet packages still support both net45 and netstandard and can be used in all IDEs).

RUNNING TESTS

gRPC C# is using NUnit as the testing framework.

Under Visual Studio, make sure NUnit test adapter is installed (under “Extensions and Updates”). Then you should be able to run all the tests using Test Explorer.

gRPC team uses a Python script to facilitate running tests for different languages.

DOCUMENTATION

PERFORMANCE

For best gRPC C# performance, use .NET Core and the Server GC mode "System.GC.Server": true for your applications.

THE NATIVE DEPENDENCY

Internally, gRPC C# uses a native library written in C (gRPC C core) and invokes its functionality via P/Invoke. The fact that a native library is used should be fully transparent to the users and just installing the Grpc.Core NuGet package is the only step needed to use gRPC C# on all supported platforms.